Take Flight
by altairattorney
Summary: [Dear Esther] She could only watch. Either way, she was never going to leave his side. [Birthday gift for laughingpineapple]


**Take Flight**

The second Esther looked back at herself, in the dazed eye of the street light, the feeling dawned on her as it could never have before.

The mass of wheels and smoke captured her eyes first. They scratched, ran and returned, struggling to build at least one solid image in the ever changing beams of the fire. They froze — she could start lining the flesh that seeped through it. In their horrified silence, she saw.

She was not to be called alive because of her breath, when it still rose in clouds to meet the night; it was not the flush of her cheeks, nor the blood which now spilled on the road. And now that her shape was no more, now that she had flown way beyond the boundary of the guardrail, she was not dead either.

There were no longer nerves nor synapses to convey the feeling. It was wild, boundless and free. The drive to live on shot through her without diversions, no longer enclosed by chemical codes.

At the side of the road, Esther stood alive; and her empty shell taught her that, if this was her death, it would know no end for a very long time.

_

There was a distortion growing in his eyes.

It was the same glimpse she had caught, a handful of years before, on the edge of the sinkhole he had almost slipped in. Nothing had ever changed between them — his eyes were a book she had the patience to read on, where everyone else shrugged and turned their back. Since the beginning, actually, the alphabet of his wishes had matched her own.

She watched the longing burn in his gaze — the ancestral wish to descend, to uncover the secrets of what lay beneath the surface. She thought of the shine that hid at the core of darkness, of the caves in her dreams, and felt the same.

It had brought them together, the thrill of filling the void.

Unable to touch, with sealed lips, Esther could only wait for the rift to grow bigger. She was there while he traced back, rebuilding the steps of a tragedy he made completely his over time. She was there when the driver's hands shook, when he came to despise his survival; she felt the sound of his bones, when they finally cracked under the weight of guilt.

When he left behind his car for a boat, long after he had lost himself, she followed.

She could only watch. Either way, she was never going to leave his side.

_

With every passing memory, he felt closer to her.

She could sense the parallel lines he ran along — each began in white chalk, each ended with a word, or bent in a diagram of lost opportunities.

He was like that. Written in his nature was the need to rebuild. He left a handprint in every idea he touched, he built a sequence, leading it straight to a solution either temporary or eternal. With her, it had not been different; he had tried and tried to relive each step and find the missing point, only to lose sight of anything, except the emptiness. There was a blank he couldn't bring himself to fill — and the failure, with each try, cut one of the threads that still bound him to reality.

When they had first met, she had decided the riddle of his mind would be hers to solve. After her passing, she blamed herself. Their logic was too entwined to keep its integrity as two separate entities — she had torn it away from him, and torn him in her own end.

So much had died. So much more than her.

She wished she could touch the broken egg shells. They reminded her of them. She stood on her own, for long hours, on the edge of the cliffs or just beyond the fence. They stood, miles away from each other, on a similar plain.

He dared not look — yet he looked for her. She noticed the corner of his eye, sometimes, flinched in fake hope.

_

It was too late to turn the whole island in his mirror.

She knew the time had come when he awoke, and his spirit almost walked by her side. Nothing stood to part her from him but a thin frame, the fabric his fevers and his rituals had so steadily unwoven.

He had fallen asleep on the far end of the island; and the circle of earth the lighthouse stood on always marked the beginning of his longest, truly sacred wanderings. The waves in his soul echoed a tempest that day — the music sheets, the net of words, had overgrown on the walls of the island as if they were running through his veins. They marked his ramblings on the rocks, expanded within his imagination. There was no point in parting them anymore.

Esther drifted nearby, staying true to his path. Quiet, on the wayside, she waited for more and more threads to loosen. His hand felt closer than ever as she spread her fingers, invisible white against the gray clouds.

For the first time in months, maybe years, he had a destination. To mark his journey sang the red light, in tune with his swaying words — up there he struggled to reach her, with all the ghosts of the future she had left behind for the years to extinguish. She walked his steps, collecting the fragments of his memories.

_

When he was in pain, voiceless, she sang to him.

Maybe — she hoped — the sleeping side of his ears would catch the sound, if transformed, maybe lowered. She no longer hoped to be heard, and yet she sang; to him, and for herself.

Halfway through the path, with the wind playing the stone flute carved in millennia, she saw the road and the full moon, and she touched his journey as it turned into theirs.

It sounded peaceful, yes, the perspective of flying. For a man who could never move on, it would mean starting anew — dropping the anchors, breaking the chains. She, too, felt lighter as he walked; her ethereal limbs balanced the lead in his feet, her fresh touch soothed the fire of the infection. On the path, in the shade of holy words, they let go of their burdens.

They were two when the ladder ended, and the last metal step traded them for another gust of wind. Two spirits erased their weight, grew useless wings in the grasp of gravity. And she thought that, at last, she only yearned for oblivion — to sink in dark waters with the last paper boats, to carve twin chalk lines against the night, would write the word freedom on both of their souls.

One man alone fell on the shore, and two were the gulls that painted the sky.


End file.
